by Pablo Tusset
I decided to tempt fate no more and return to the building where I had started my wandering – not just because it was doubtful that the guards looking for me would still be milling about the spot where I had escaped from them, but also because the bathroom of that first office was the only source of natural light I had come across on my search-and-discovery mission. I also remembered the veterinarian’s reference to my Magnificent Brother. The First couldn’t be very far from here – it seemed implausible that whoever the hell was in charge of this mess would scatter his prisoners all over this labyrinth. Clearly the floor where I had come to was used as a prison by the organisation, or cult, or whatever you’d call the kind of club that would have those low-lifes as members.
Once I made it back to the washroom, I stuck my head out of the little window. Down below, the ventilation shaft grew darker and darker until you could barely make out the black surface at the bottom. Up above, through a green skylight you could see the light from the sky. Aside from suffering from agoraphobia, misanthropy and an aversion to hens, I also have a pretty serious fear of heights, but my need to escape to the outside world was so intense at that moment that I actually considered climbing up toward that greenish light. However, the ventilation shaft most likely ran past the prison zone, so all I had to do to confirm the hypothesis was mentally retrace the steps I had taken since leaving the men in the hall. Once I accepted it as fact, perhaps the most sensible option would not be to climb up the shaft toward the roof, but rather to climb down to the floor in question and try to locate The First. After all, this was not just an escape mission but a rescue effort as well. Plus, as an added bonus, the descent offered thick Uralite pipes that I could cling to on the way down, an option not available on the ride up. Clinging to them for six flights was pretty much out of the question, though, and so I figured I might be able to take the stairs down several floors, and then scale down the shaft for the last (or even last two) floors. Now, the question was how many floors beneath me were empty and on which of them could I gain access to the corresponding toilet without anyone seeing me?
There was only one way to find out: start going downstairs. Taking every possible precaution, I gingerly approached the staircase that I had climbed up when I had fled from the guards. The silence was absolute, as was the darkness. I stuck my head out into the central space and saw electric light on the lowest floor. I dared to descend a flight, peering down into the central opening all the while. Then I leaned in toward the double doors that led into the main space of that floor. I didn’t hear a thing, so I opened the door a crack. I looked left and right: all dark, just like the floor above. This seemed encouraging, so I descended to the next floor down. And the next and the next one after that – on and on until I reached the floor immediately above the one with the metal-bar door that opened onto the corridor where I had been locked up initially. Everything was absolutely still – all you could hear was the buzzing of the fluorescent lights: “zzzz.” This time, with renewed stealth, I opened the door to the office or apartment space directly above the prison zone.
What I saw, however, was nothing new, at least not in the flickering glow of my lighter. Aside from a parquet floor and a pile of things next to the door (unplugged refrigerator, two dusty chairs, empty coat rack), it was exactly the same as the top floor, just as vacant and dirty, although the strong labyrinth smell was almost imperceptible here – it was almost as if closeness to the inhabited zone of the building had diluted its essence somehow. I went straight to the toilet in the back, opened the shaftway window and confirmed that the black abyss came to an end at the floor just below me. At that point I began working on getting my body out the little window. That was the tough part. After that, I disentangled myself and landed with no problem, but it was pretty damn creepy to feel my bare feet settle down on the ground floor of that foul shaftway, and so I tried to enter the ground-floor toilet as quickly as possible, entering the window head-first, which forced me to land in the toilet in a vertical fashion. The bad thing about that, however, was that everything came falling out of my pockets, resulting in a quarter-gram of cocaine scattered across the floor and a now-broken blue porcelain poodle. I would be able to fix the poodle a few days later with Krazy Glue, and in fact I am looking at it now as I write this. Crouching down on all-fours to lick a bathroom floor, however, did seem a bit excessive, even for Roger Wilco, and so the quarter-gram of cocaine was lost forever.
Right. So now I was in the toilet of the floor I needed to be on, probably some twenty metres from the guard. Now what?
I heard coughing sounds: that bronchitis-like cough that is something of a brotherly bond between me and my fellow smokers of the world.
I could stay hidden in the toilet, wait until the guy needed to take a piss and as soon as he walked in the door, bop him on the head with the remnants of the porcelain poodle. Of course, the guy could take hours before coming in or, who knew, maybe the guards peed somewhere else, or it maybe was absolutely forbidden for them to abandon their posts. Plus I don’t exactly have lots of experience felling goons in a single blow, and I wasn’t very confident about my ability to calibrate the minimum impact that was called for: I was sure I would either fall short and thus give him the chance to react, or else crack his head open in one go.
I decided to stick the old moustache out the door for a second to see if I could think up some alternative to the concussion-by-blue-poodle move. The coughs were coming in intervals – the poor guy was clearly trying to expel some very deeply lodged phlegm that wouldn’t budge, and so I took advantage of the noisy coughing moments to open the door a crack, to see if it made any creaking noises. As I did this, I got a bird’s-eye view of a flight of stairs going down from the room between the guards, only a few metres away from me. During the next round of coughs I opened the door wider and went out into the light of the hallway. The guard’s desk was partially hidden behind the wall and I could only see about half of his body. His arms were bent at the elbow, and his hands were pressed against his ears, like a student cramming for an exam. He was about thirty metres to my left.
From there, the most sensible move was to go down the staircase to my right and see what I found – assuming, of course, that I didn’t bump into another sentinel downstairs. At this point, the only thing left to decide was whether to crawl my way out of the washroom right then or wait for another coughing jag and tiptoe my way out. Crawling, in its most conventional form, is not my best mode of movement, for I was likely to drag everything in the vicinity down with me, not unlike a snail. So the tiptoe bit was a better option. But crossing through that door was a tough one. The coughing fits had tapered off, and now I was starting to get nervous. I stuck my nose out again to see what the fuck was going on and I saw the guy lean over to his right. Then I heard noises that sounded kind of like drawers being opened and closed. This, I decided, was my big chance and I left the toilet with bated breath – not very fast, just taking very wide steps in the direction of the stairs. I didn’t pick up the pace until I reached the first step, at which point I ran down as quickly as I could to the first landing. I stood there for a second or two, crouching down against the stairs, trying to make out what was on the floor below. The next flight led straight into an open space of about twenty square metres, which gave me the sense that I was going down to some kind of enclosed cell in the middle of a solid edifice of some sort. I could hear the sound of water droplets falling down into a somewhat full bucket: plong, plong, plong … The cement floor was completely flooded despite the central drain. I spied a tap sticking out of the wall in front of me, connected to a hose of some sort, and realised that that was the source of the drops – plong, plong, plong – which fell into a large sink attached to the wall. The dominant colour, aside from the tiles running along the lower part of the walls, was a depressing concrete-grey tone, illuminated by the fluorescent light that reflected off the water on the floor. An intense odour of humidity permeated the air, and of all the rooms in that build
ing that reminded me of a jail, this one took the cake: it looked like a Le Corbusier reinterpretation of a medieval torture chamber. The walls were the most interesting thing in the place: there were four doors altogether, two doors on either side, facing one another: metal doors, also grey, with little windows in the middle which served as viewing holes, though these windows were much narrower than the ones on the floor above – they were almost like those little peepholes you see on tanks.
As I went down the stairs, now fully upright, I could feel the dampness penetrate my socks. I approached the first door to my left and peered in through the window. A wooden chair, a foam mattress on the floor, a plastic curtain that hid about a quarter of the room from view, and not much else. The walls were all covered in white tiles from the bottom half down, and all of them had stains – some that were droplets of water, others that were more spattered, others that were more like scrub marks, others that were more faded, and then some long marks that extended across the length of the wall in parallel tracks.
I tried hard not to get too freaked out and went to see what was behind door number two. This time, the walls and the furniture were the least of it, because the first thing that jumped out at me was a biggish guy in his underwear, sitting in a chair similar to the one in the other cell. He was facing me, head down, hands behind his back. He seemed to be in a half-sleep state, and I could see he was breathing by the way his chest would rise and fall in regular intervals. When I looked closer at his face, even in his semi-hidden position, I could tell that someone had performed quite a bit of bare-fisted cosmetic surgery on him.
Despite that unknown sonofabitch’s handiwork, however, I was able to recognise that the person sitting there was Sebastian, my brother.
By the time I had unbolted the door, the seated Christ figure had looked up toward his unexpected visitor and tried to open his eyes.
‘Hey, kid,’ I said, not so much to piss him off but to make it easier for him to recognise me through his eyelids, which now resembled a pair of ripened figs.
‘What … what the fuck are you doing here, idiot?’
That was The First. Same as ever.
‘Oh, you know: I was just walking by and said to myself, shit, I’m gonna go rescue that fucking pretty-boy brother of mine.’
‘Right. And now who’s gonna rescue you, jerk?’
In addition to a pair of black eyes that were nothing more than slits, he most definitely had a broken nose, plus there was blood all over his chin and all the way down to his chest. All this fistwork had to have happened days earlier because the blood was all caked up in little strips. His breathing, in short little gulps, had dried out his mouth and as a result he could only speak in raspy, clumsy whispers which were further belaboured by his lip, which was swollen and cut. On the rest of his body I could see bruises here and there beneath the blood that had flowed from his nose, but his body was still in better overall shape than his face.
‘Are you calm enough to untie me?’
‘I’m actually wondering whether I shouldn’t beat you up a little more.’
I let it go, though, because there wasn’t much more room on his face to fuck with. I walked around the chair and got to work untying the ropes that kept his hands behind his back. His right ring finger and pinkie were pretty smashed-up; I would have to avoid them if I wanted to keep him from writhing in his chair. Once I undid the rope, his arms moved forward in slow-motion, suggesting some serious pain that seemed most concentrated around his ribcage. I let him be for a moment and left the cell to fetch some water from the sink sticking out of the wall in the other room. I turned on the tap and tasted a bit of the water that came out. Its first-class, bleach-like taste seemed to indicate that it was drinkable. I washed the decapitated, hollow body of the porcelain poodle as best I could, filled it with water, and then brought it to my brother. I placed the poodle to his lips, covering the jagged porcelain edge with my finger, and then repeated the operation various times, going back and forth from my brother to the tap outside the room to refill the poodle. I did this until he was able to stick his tongue out of his mouth and run it over his lips in a wet caress that enabled him to speak a bit clearer.
‘How are Gloria and the children …’
‘Good. Holed up at home, with Mom and Dad and Beba. What about your secretary?’
‘She’s with them.’
‘Them?’
‘It’s a long story.’
I decided to hold off on that one for the moment.
‘Is there any one part of your body that hurts worse than the rest?’
He shook his head.
‘Everything kind of … aches. Every time they come in and knock me about, they kick the shit out of my bruises but then after a while I get used to it and it stops hurting. Then they leave me alone until I stiffen up again.’
I thought about giving him a bit of coke, but one of his nostrils was almost completely blocked off by his bashed-in bridge, and the other one was completely obstructed by congealed blood.
‘Listen. You don’t deserve it but I’m gonna wipe up that runny nose you’ve got. Just stay cool and don’t get smart or anything with me. Then we’ll see how well you can walk; I’m not planning on carrying you out of here on my shoulders.’
He nodded in agreement. That was when I realised he was trembling from the cold and I figured I ought to take care of that before anything else. I removed my shirt and placed it over his shoulders and he immediately wrapped it around his body, grateful for the warmth it provided. I thought of giving him my socks as well, but they were sopping wet from all the back and forth between the cell and the sink, and that would probably be even worse for him. I did, however, drag the filthy mattress over so that he would have somewhere to prop his feet, and once he seemed to have warmed up a little I told him to tilt his head back so I could inspect his face in the light. I decided not to go anywhere near the left nostril that his broken nose had closed in on, and instead began to pick away at the coagulated blood in the other nostril with my finger, trying to get my nail inside so that I might remove the blackened mass that was blocking the hole. It wasn’t easy, and my patient began to complain when I forced his nose skin up and back a little to create some extra space. I needed a very fine instrument with which to dig, and I briefly considered using the tip of my belt buckle. With patience, however, I managed to dislodge a tiny bit of gummy matter, behind which a dark macaroni-sized chunk came popping out, about as thick as a pencil, directly followed by a long, transparent blob of goo with little red vein-like things inside. The First let out an ‘aahhh’ indicating the relief he felt at being freed of one of his many nagging pains, but there was still something else burbling inside. With firm but gentle pressure, I placed my finger over his left nostril and ordered him to breathe out, hard, through the right. This succeeded in liberating all the dried blood and mucous inside his nostril and finally, I could hear him breathe through his nose. At least one of the passageways was in working order now.
‘How is my nose?’ he asked, his voice clearer though still little more than a whisper.
‘Like a hard cock in profile.’
‘Set it straight for me.’
‘What?’
‘Set it straight. It’ll be easier for you than for me, but if you can’t handle it just tell me and I’ll do it myself. The bone has been sitting like that for a few days now, and if it sets in this position I’m going to have more trouble with it in the long run.’
‘It’s going to hurt …’
‘I know.’
I know. After that little comment I didn’t want to come off as some kind of sissy, but I still get a chill whenever I think of that cric-cric of those broken nose bones. Technically speaking, it wasn’t a difficult operation – all I had to do was take my two forefingers and shift the central nose bone back to the middle of his face and remodel the bridge a little with a bit of help from the toothbrush that I stuck as far as I could up his nostril, kind of like the way you use a sh
oe tree. I did all of this according to The First’s explicit instructions. Every last muscle in my body, from the tips of my toes up to my scalp, remained locked in a state of high tension for the duration of that extemporaneous rhinoplasty. The First simply gritted his teeth throughout the whole thing, even when he saw me faltering and had to cheer me on a bit. Once or twice a tear would suddenly bubble up from his eye and come to rest on the purplish cushion of his eyelids, like a diamond sitting in its velvet case.
When the ordeal was over, his nose was still swollen and ever so slightly inclined toward the left, but it looked a whole lot different now. And when he blew his nose it seemed that he had all but recovered the use of the air passages. This was the moment to avail ourselves of my cocaine and its various virtues. I took out my wad of bills, rolled one up, opened one of the papers with the coke in it, and told him to breathe in.
‘What’s this?’
‘Half sodium bicarbonate, forty per cent random barbiturates and maybe a little bit of third-rate cocaine. But it works.’
‘I thought you were only addicted to alcohol and hash …’
‘And carpenter’s glue, too … Don’t start fucking with me, Sebastian. Anyway, don’t you drink coffee? Well, this is very similar to caffeine. Snort a little of the powder and you’ll feel like you’ve just had a half-litre of espresso. It’ll do you good.’
